So, Microsoft servers went down, and all over LinkedIn I can hear the sky is falling because Teams, MS365, Co-Pilot, and a bunch of other things aren't working. This kind of outage happens now and then, this specific outage is new, but servers going down or services being interrupted happens all the time. This outage is pretty widespread, and it's probably impacting all of us to some degree -- but why are people getting worked up about it?
Many, many years ago I studied at a judo dojo -- the sensei was an elderly British man. For two years, I attended his dojo, for the first two months, I learned meditative breathing, and afterwords I learned some rudimentary Japanese words, and then learned stances, holds, and throws. Judo is 'the gentle way', and the philosophy is to use your opponent's force and redirect it to your benefit. It's water flowing around the stone.
Spending time and energy pushing back on things can be exhausting.
There's no value in fighting things you can't control, but redirecting obstacles, stresses, and challenges so they don't hit you, or even turn them back on themselves to fight the problem. And I had been doing this my whole life because of an elderly British gentleman taught me this in my youth.
In the collection world, if you end up in conflict with someone on the phone, you aren't going to end up collecting an account, because an emotional conflict prevents negotiation.
If you are in a toxic workplace with demanding managers, you need to not absorb the stress, but try to redirect things in small subtle ways to make a better environment.
If your house burns down (like mine did many years ago), you need to treasure the fact that no one was hurt, celebrate the sentimental things that were rescued, and realize everything else that was lost are just trappings and replaceable.
When a staff member is failing you need to address why they are failing and support them if you can rather than creating stress or friction.
At home, when my wife tells me 'we're having a fight!', I tell her 'no, you are having a fight -- you win' (by the way, that doesn't win you points in the long run, so maybe I don't recommend this).
When a whole bunch of Microsoft servers go down, you need to roll with it during the outage, and when everything is restored, ask yourself if the outage was bad enough you should be looking at alternative options, redundancies, or it's just something you lived with for a short while. But burning energy, emotion, and stress on a problem isn't going to solve it any faster.
Water around the stone is an ancient philosophy -- but in the modern business world we call it Agile Management, non-linear decision making, and soft skills.
Ever want to chat about how to handle problems outside of your control? Send me an email, and we can have a meeting (I use Google Meet more than Teams, so we're good).
Cheers,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
226-946-1730
blair@receivableaccounts.com
